Younger readers probably don’t remember this, but before 1980 much of the world was subjected to extraordinarily high marginal tax rates – 91% in the United States before 1964, 98% in Britain from 1974-79 (and 135% in 1968). The Laffer Curve, which states that tax revenues are zero at marginal tax rates of 0% and […]

We are now within three months of the climacteric year of 2012 around which the 1997 Kyoto Protocol was built, and therefore within fifteen months of a period in which the Kyoto restrictions will no longer have effect. No fewer than sixteen conferences have been held in an attempt to find a successor to Kyoto, […]

A few weeks ago, I compared Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to the Weimar Republic central banker Rudolf von Havenstein. The comparison looks even better after the Fed’s non-performance April 27 and the markets’ subsequent response. Even the more cautious members of the general media are beginning to compare the current outlook to that of the […]

Both the rioters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the Western commentators on those riots have missed a vitally important component of Egypt’s miseries: its excessive and rapidly rising population. With such population growth even the wisest Egyptian ruler, the great Ptah-hotep, could not have achieved a rapid rise in the living standards of Egypt’s people. […]

Goldman Sachs’ $2 billion deal for Facebook, valuing the social networking site at $50 billion, combines the worst elements of the 1997-2000 and 2004-07 bubbles. It sets a grossly excessive valuation on an Internet company with modest revenues and prospects. It also involves an investment bank structuring a complex deal to maximize its own fees, […]

The French sale of an advanced helicopter carrier with all the latest equipment to Russia announced last week is yet another indication that not only are the old Cold War certainties gone, but so are the assumptions of the benign U.S.-centric “globalized” world of 1991-2010. The new multi-polar world order that seems to be emerging […]

As long-term U.S. interest rates rise and negative global reactions roll in to the Fed’s announcement November 3 of a further $600 billion round of “quantitative easing” purchases of Treasury bonds to the inquiring mind one question becomes uppermost: Even though there’s a huge amount of competition for this title, is it indeed possible that […]

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke loses sleep over the possibility that the United States may suffer a repeat of the 1930s Great Depression. Inflation hawks and opponents of President Obama’s Keynesian “stimulus” warn continually of a possible repeat of the 1970s stagflation. Yet recent data is beginning to suggest a more unpleasant possibility still: that the […]

The United States is often held out as the world’s principal beacon of free-market principle. To the extent that it backslides, there is thought to be little hope for such principles in other countries. Yet as last week’s housing finance debate demonstrated again, the United States was populist before it was capitalist, and free-market principles […]

July’s Scientific American carried a fascinating article “The science of economic bubbles and busts” that summarized current biological research into the economic irrationality of human behavior. At the risk of boring readers whose coverage extends to biological research literature as well as the Wall Street Journal, I thought it worth exploring its implications for how […]